Last week we led a $6.5 million investment in Mattermark. Based in San Francisco, Mattermark’s mission is to organize the world’s business information to answer questions about the companies you want to do business with.

While there have been numerous efforts over the last 20 years to organize detailed private company data on the Internet, the end result is still lame. Classical search approaches like Google are a mess – you can get bits and pieces of the data, but it’s impossible to get what you want in one place. When you use public company data as a metaphor, it’s not surprising that Bloomberg still exists in the world of Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, and a continued list of non-comprehensive, relatively neglected data sets and presentation layers.

Today, the data signals about private companies are ubiquitous. But no one organizes the data effectively. When you buy a CRM system, it comes empty. Everyone re-collects similar data from a wide-variety of sources and ends up recreating the same spreadsheets to try to do data analysis. Much of the data that gets presented is in PDFs or other report formats that are not structured or searchable. When market research on private companies consists of Google searches, manual data entry by analysts, and spreadsheets to present information, there’s an opportunity.

Mattermark is going after the entire data ecosystem with a goal of making the definitive market research product for company information. The first phase of the business is to become the premier source for private company intelligence with the goal of building a fully-automated analytical infrastructure to enable data-enabled consulting.

Mattermark was originally founded in 2012 as Referly, which was a completely different company. The founders raised some money, realized they weren’t making any progress, shut down Referly, but took their remaining capital and pivoted completely to what became Mattermark. Danielle Morrill, Kevin Morrill, and Andy Sparks then launched Mattermark in mid-2013, raised additional angel rounds, and saw revenue growth each month of their subscription based product.

We initially invested in Mattermark in the fall through our FG Angels syndicate. We are psyched to now be major investors in Mattermark.

And, if you are looking for an epic job at the ground floor of a company in the bay area, there might be one for you.

We are pleased to announce we have invested in Spare5.  The company is building a software platform that allows experts to monetize their spare time via mobile device.

As our newest theme “Marketplace” evolves, we think about underserved markets that should be working together, but through lack of technology are not.  We have a special interest in markets that involve some sort of remnant asset that needs monetization and that is spoiled and / or lost if not used.

The average American spends four to six hours a day on leisure, commuting or waiting activities.  With over 160 million smartphones in the U.S., plus a population that checks their mobile devices over 100 times a day, there is a huge market of remnant time that exists every day.  Many of these people have particular skills that would be useful for particular tasks.

Spare5 seeks to create value with this wasted time by building a software platform that matches people with particular skills (“experts”) to do discreet tasks for companies interested in a particular demographic.

For instance:  only college-educated people with 3+ years work experience of “interior design” can do Porch.com tagging assignments, and only people who have followed People.com, US Weekly or reality TV shows may tag Getty Images entertainment photos.  In short, Spare5 recruits and aggregates valuable cohorts of experts and sells this expertise to companies, while paying the experts and taking a cut at the same time.

The software platform helps ensure the quality of work and also learns over time how to do certain tasks, which then helps automate some of the lower level work desired by customers.  Initially, the company will focus on tasks involving image tagging, video tagging, image editing, surveys and data verification.

The company was founded by Matt Bencke, Daryn Nakhuda and Patrick O’Donnell.  Matt was formerly an executive at Getty Images, Microsoft and Boeing.  Daryn was the technical lead at Porch and Teachstreet and held senior technical positions at Amazon.  Patrick was a founder and CTO at Urbanspoon.

We are stoked to get to work with the team.  Welcome!

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve co-led (along with Techstars’ Bullet Time Ventures and with participation from FreshTracks Capital) a Series A financing for Ello, a new and disruptive social network. Based in Burlington, Vermont and founded and run by our long time friend Paul Budnitz, Ello is basing their business on a fundamentally different premise than other social networks – specifically eschewing building a business that is reliant on third-party advertising or the selling of user data.

We’re strong supporters of the Ello team’s unique vision for the business. Along with the founders of the company, as well as their other investors, we have signed and support the Ello Charter that you see below (click on the image to open it in another window to enlarge it).

It’s important that we state this clearly, since there are bound to be people who view this financing with skepticism. Foundry Group is completely supportive of the Ello mission. We’ll either build a business that doesn’t rely on third party advertising or the selling of user data or we won’t build a business. Our belief is that there are products and features that Ello can develop that users will be willing to pay for. While the price points may be low, as part of a much larger ecosystem with millions of users, will provide an economic model for the company which supports the business and our investment.

While Ello has of late received a lot of press and attention, we’ve actually been following the company since its inception because of our relationship with Ello co-founder Paul Budnitz. Paul has a unique relationship with Foundry – he’s the only founder we’ve ever had an agreed upon term sheet with that decided not to close on our investment. This was for a business idea prior to Ello when Paul lived in Boulder. To Paul’s credit as we were in the final stages of documenting the investment he realized that several key business level items weren’t coming into place and, after consulting with us about his concerns, he decided that the timing wasn’t right for him to pursue his idea. We parted ways but remained friends as Paul moved from Boulder to Vermont, pursued his passion for bicycle design (the four of us each own some of the earliest production models of Budnitz bikes) and eventually started Ello.

So welcome Paul and team to the Foundry portfolio. We’re excited to have you as part of the family! And if you’re on Ello, please connect with us: @sether, @bfeld, @jasonmendelson, and @ryanmc.

We are pleased to announce that we’ve co-led the $11m Series B funding of about.me. Based in San Francisco, about.me is a platform for representing personal identity online allowing users to create and maintain a curated page for self-expression. For examples, take a look at Brad Feld, Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Jason Mendelson.

We have long been obsessed with the notion of online identity and self-expression. One of our early Foundry Group investments, Gist tackled part of this problem, but was acquired relatively earlier in its life by RIM. More recently, our investment in FullContact addresses the idea of a definitive contact record for everyone on the planet, generated automatically from publicly available data.

about.me solves the opposite side of this problem – it allows everyone on the planet to create and maintain a definitive contact record for themselves. But this isn’t a boring contact record, nor is it a canned, dull, uninspired list of things you’ve done and places you’ve worked. It’s a beautiful, user crafted articulation of one’s online identity, that anyone can easily create.

And that’s only the beginning. about.me combines identity with search, discovery, and communication. Interested in learning more about some of your favorite venture capitalists or people living in Boulder, CO? After you’ve found them, you can communicate with them while clearly articulating your own identity, in a way in which each of you are in control of.

We’ve known Tony Conrad, the co-founder of about.me for many years. We’ve invested with him, and his partners at True Ventures, in many companies. We think about.me is special and decided to go all in with Tony and True to go after what we think is an opportunity to finally create the definitive source for identity and self-expression online.

As of today we have made 13 investments via FG Angels – 11 have been announced and two will be closed within a week.

On 10/1/13, we announced that we were going to create a syndicate on AngelList and start doing seed investments that way. Our plan was to make 50 seed investments by the end of 2014, using the angel strategy that Brad has been using for his own angel investing since 1994.

We spent the balance of 2013 figuring out a long list of legal issues, including vexing ones like the 99 investor problem, and whether we were going to use 506(c) or 506(b) for our securities exemptions.  We opened up the FG Angels syndicate, and closed our first investment in early January 2014 in OnTheGo Platform.

Since then we’ve closed a total of 11investments. You can see them on the FG Angels tab on our Foundry Group portfolio page.  The other two will be announced and put up on the site once they close.

The FG Angels syndicate now has 193 investors who commit up to $455,000 per investment. At first we thought these were interesting numbers, but now we realize they are simply vanity metrics given the 99 investor rule.

Each of our syndicates have ranged between $125,000 and $300,000, not including the $50,000 from us. It’s been hard to figure out what drives this on a case by case basis as we are generally equally enthusiastic about each of the companies. Originally we were using a minimum of $1,000 per investor but decided to raise it to $2,000 given the 99 investor rule. That had a little impact, but less than we expected.

A month ago we felt like the issue might be syndicate fatigue, which surprised us given that we’ve been clear that we are going to do 50 investments and the best strategy for an angel would be to invest in each of them along side us. But then we had a few investments where the amount trended up, so that probably wasn’t it.

It’s been an interesting experiment so far. AngelList has continued to be awesome to work with and we are excited about the angel portfolio we have been creating.